lean meat

On a whim, I purchased Cordain's new cookbook on my Kindle recently.

In it he mentions that he buys whole sides of beef from a local farmer, which I applaud. In fact, I'd love to be in Cordain's cow-share, because it seems that he is still maintaining a bit of a fat phobia. Exhibit 1: Foods You Should Avoid: candy, sugar, soft drinks, lamb chops...wait??? Lamb chops? Yes, Cordain still says to avoid fatty meats like turkey legs, pork ribs, pork chops, fatty beef roasts, T-bones steaks, etc. What does he do with those cuts in his cow share? Throw them away?

I understand that wild animals do generally have less fat than domestic animals, but even grass-fed animals have plenty of fat. If you are truly eating as our ancestors did, nose to tail, you are going to eat both lean and fatty meats.

But according to this cookbook " the foundation of the Paleo Diet is high-quality, low-fat protein foods, don’t feel guilty about eating lean meat, poultry, fish, or seafood at every meal—it is precisely what you need to do, along with adding as many fresh fruits and vegetables as you like."

On his recommended foods list is "LEAN POULTRY (white meat, skin removed)." In a chicken recipe he says "Drain excess fat from pan and return pan to burner." Jesus wept.

Processed meats are bad because "they are synthetic mixtures of meat and fat; they are artificially combined at the meatpacker or butcher’s whim with no consideration for the actual fatty acid profile of the wild animals our Stone Age ancestors ate." And skinless chicken breast cooked in olive oil is just like the fatty acid profile of wild animals?

Eggs? "So go ahead and enjoy this highly nutritious food; just don’t overdo it."

Yes, he recommends cooking with olive oil, which is a great way to ruin good oil, since olive oil has lots of delicate omega-6s. Not to mention the flavors of a good oil are destroyed by heat. At least he no longer recommends the vile canola oil. This piece of info was useful:

Since the publication of the first edition of The Paleo Diet in 2002, I have reversed my position on canola oil and can no longer endorse its consumption. Canola oil comes from the seeds of the rape plant (Brassica rapa or Brassica campestris), which is a relative of the broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kale family. Undoubtedly, humans have eaten cabbage and its relatives since before historical times, and I still strongly support the consumption of these health-promoting vegetables. Nevertheless, the concentrated oil from Brassica seeds is another story. In its original form, rape plants produced a seed oil that contained elevated levels (20 to 50 percent) of erucic acid (a monounsaturated fatty acid labeled 22:1n9). Erucic acid is toxic and causes tissue damage in many organs of laboratory animals. In the early 1970s, Canadian plant breeders developed a strain of rape plant that yielded a seed with less than 2 percent erucic acid (thus the name canola oil). The erucic acid content of commercially available canola oil averages 0.6 percent. Despite its low erucic acid content, a number of experiments in the 1970s showed that even at low concentrations (2.0 and 0.88 percent), canola oil fed to rats could still elicit minor heart scarring that was considered pathological. A series of recent rat studies of low-erucic canola oil conducted by Dr. Ohara and colleagues at the Hatano Research Institute in Japan reported kidney injuries, increases in blood sodium levels, and abnormal changes in the hormone aldosterone, which regulates blood pressure. Other harmful effects of canola oil consumption in animals (at 10 percent of their total calories) included decreased litter sizes, behavioral changes, and liver damage. A number of recent human studies of canola and rapeseed oil by Dr. Poiikonen and colleagues at the University of Tempere in Finland showed it to be a potent allergen in adults and children that causes allergic cross-reactions from other environmental allergens. Based on these brand-new findings in both humans and animals, I prefer to err on the safe side and can no longer recommend canola oil in the modern-day Paleo Diet.

He notes the curious fact that coconut oil doesn't seem so bad, but can't seem to admit that it's because saturated fat isn't bad:

Strangely enough, traditional cultures that consume coconut foods have little or no heart disease, stroke, or other cardiovascular problems normally associated with eating saturated fats (such as the lauric acid found in coconuts). Although we don’t completely understand this inconsistency, it may be due to lauric acid’s positive antibacterial effect in the gut.

It's a bright spot in a book that highlights the main defect in the paleo diet movement: disconnect from tradition. We don't know what Stone Age people really ate. They are all dead. The science lab has some lessons, but it becomes plainly obvious that many paleo professors would be baffled by the wild. It's interesting to contrast this book with Plants That We Eat, by Anore Jones, who lived with the Inuit for 19 years. That book deserves its own post, but while wild animals don't have good marbling, it's clear they have fat. Enough to use to preserve greens and berries, enough to make  "agutuk" ice cream with caribou fat, enough to have jars and jars of the stuff, as I do from my "lean" grass fed lamb. Lean is relative. And there is a lot of bias in our culture because we discard the fat of venison, for example, because of its "unpleasant" taste.

Cordain notes that "hunter-gatherers typically ate the entire animal—brains, eyeballs, tongue, marrow, liver, kidneys, intestines, gonads—whereas these organs are unappetizing to most of us." But chicken breast cooked in olive oil is not a replacement for marrow! 

Overall I really wanted to like this book. Cordain seems like a great guy and it's clear he makes an effort to feed his entire family well. It's funny that when I was tired I misread his recipe for Monterey Mushrooms as being for Monastic Mushrooms. I think the diet he prescribes is unnecessarily ascetic due to his bias against saturated fat. There are some recipes I will be trying, like the "tamales" made with squash, but overall I think the diet he eats could be more nourishing with the addition of more fat and organs.